LEB:Player's Guide

Players in Living Eberron are vital to its success; players provide the spark of life for each character and drive the story of the setting forward. This guide provides information for how to play PCs in LEB's play-by-post persistent world campaign; for how to propose and run adventures, see the campaign guide.

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Eberron is a world of action and intrigue. It is a world coming out of the horrors of a century long war ended by a mysterious calamity that destroyed a nation. The world of Eberron looks outward to rebuild and explore this new age while keeping their eyes open for shadows from the past. Eberron is a world where the PCs are the heroes; as agents of shadow governments, contractors to powerful mercantile houses, or independent explorers delving into the relics of lost civilizations, PCs in Eberron are at the forefront of the stories told in the Sharn Inquisitive and other such broadsheets.

In order to participate, we request that you set your settings on the message board so that private messaging is available to other participants in the game. This can be done by editing your options to Enable Private Messaging. Allowing private messaging is important because if you do not allow them, DMs and judges will have a much harder time contacting you.

In order to play, you will need to create a character. Once your first character has earned 4 RP, you are allowed to create a second character. Characters played by the same player may not interact with each other in any meaningful way. They should never be in the same place at the same time, and they cannot exchanging items or services, even through a third party. Only two characters per player are allowed at this time; to make a third, one of your first two will have to die or retire (see the Death and Retirement section below).

A character is created using the guidelines defined in the Character Creation Guide. Once your character has been submitted and approved, a link to the approved version of your character sheet will be added to list of approved characters. Characters must be re-approved when they level up.

Once your character is submitted, your character may enter the tavern thread. The tavern is for characters in between adventures, and it is the most likely place for a new adventures to begin.
You may enter the tavern and even join adventures (with your DM's approval, of course) before being approved, but you cannot be awarded any experience until you are approved.

Once you join an adventure, you are expected to warn your DM if you are unable to post fairly frequently. Exactly how frequently depends on the DM, but most DMs prefer to be told if you cannot post for two or three days or longer. If you do not warn the DM, they may choose to exclude your character from some of the adventure's rewards, or even to dismiss them from the adventure. Players who disappear may also lose eligibility for any player rewards.

When you are awarded enough experience to gain a level, first update your PC in the Wiki. Then, you must notify your DM (if you are continuing in the adventure where you received the level) or re-submit your character to the judges if you are leaving the adventure or if it has finished; a DM may also explicitly request a formal PC review via re-submission. When you complete your adventure, you need to re-submit your character for review as well.

In a world where brave adventurers fight against monsters, death can be all too common. Many accept this as their destiny, as priests powerful enough to return a deceased one to the world of the living are rare, and even the good-aligned ones are not always willing to perform that task, especially to those not of the faith. Followers of the Silver Flame are also generally against raising the dead, as they feel the dead join the Flame in the afterlife. However, the Draconic Prophesy often marks out PCs for its own purposes, and ways may be found to return the dead to life. Aside from PC ritual casters, the most common method for resurrection is the Raise Dead ritual performed at major House Jorasco enclaves—assuming a price can be agreed upon. That price is, of course, the cost of the Raise Dead ritual: 500g up to level 10, 5000g for 11–20, and 50000g at level 21 or higher.

When your character dies, and they either cannot be resurrected or would not want to be resurrected, leave the character sheet intact, but preface it with a note that the character is dead, and at what level it happened. The best way to do this is to add the appropriate category to the end of character sheet:

It is also recommended you remove the "LEB:Approved Character" category as well.

A permanently dead character obviously does not count against the number of PCs you can have. If your character gained at least two levels before dying, you can mark them as permanently dead, and replace them with a character of of a higher level that may be normally allowed. This works the same way as retiring such a character (see below).

Not every adventurer stays one until his death. Some may want to retire before meeting an untimely end, or because they feel they achieved their goals and have no reason to further embark on quests. As such, you may decide to retire one of your characters, possibly to make room for a new one, since the number of PCs a player may have is limited.

Retirement is permanent. You cannot choose to return from retirement.

When you decide to retire a character, keep the character sheet intact, but preface it with a note that the character has been retired, and at what level it happened. The best way to do this is to add the appropriate category to the end of character sheet:

Create the new character at the same level as the old, but without the extra gold earned from the previous level (i.e., no gold equal to 1/5th the cost of magic item of one level less than your character's level).

For example, if you retire a 5th level character and choose option the second option, the replacement level 5th level character would only get 1/5th the sum of the cost of magic items of levels 1 through 3rd, instead of 1st through 4th. In either case, you lose any excess XP above the start of the level as which the character was created.

It is permitted to recreate the "same" character with different mechanics, in order to change the character in ways beyond what the one-time overhaul allows: For instance, turning a wizard into a sorceror, or an orc into a half-orc. This can be accompanied by an explanation in-game (such as revealing that the orc has a hidden human parent) or considered a ret-con (such as declaring that the wizard was always a sorceror, and building him as a wizard in the first place was a mistake). You should seek permission from your DM if you wish to do this mid-adventure.

If you wish, you can mark your retired PC as public, effectively turning him into an NPC that DMs can use in their adventures, and possibly develop further. This can be done using the following category:

[[Category:LEB:NPCs]]

You should not do this if you recreate the same character, of course.

The retirement rule is intended to give players a way of gracefully escaping from characters they are tired of, that are not as much fun as they had hoped, who have accomplished their character goals, or were not built in a way that truly reflects the player's conception. It is not a license to continually optimize the same character, get out of permanent conditions for free, or choose better items for the same character. Players who abuse this rule may find themselves warned by the judges, or their replacement characters may be denied approval. When in doubt, ask a judge.

Players are rewarded for taking part in LEB in several ways. First, the presence of judges ensure that games never end abruptly; if a DM leaves a game for some reason, a judge can take over and either continue the adventure, find a new DM, or terminate it gracefully—PCs are never left hanging. Secondly, LEB provides rewards to PCs that complete adventures. For details, see Player Rewards.

The setting of LEB—its geography, backstory, NPCs, regions, and so forth—is described elsewhere on the wiki and in the material provided by the Eberron Player's Guide and the Eberron Campaign Guide. As a living persistent world, however, the setting is designed to grow and change over time. While DMs have a role to play in world building, players have a role as well: You create setting details as part of your characters' backstories. Since there are many characters in LEB, and it's not possible to check everyone's backstory all the time, if you write content into your character's backstory that you want to be a persistent part of the shared world, it would be a good idea to edit that information into the setting wiki. Also, DMs are encouraged to look at players' backstories and, with permission from the player, include that content in their adventures. Judges will read these backstories at character approval time, and will ask for changes if it does not fit. If your character's backstory creates major changes to the setting, or to make sure your setting changes are integrated fully into the setting, it is best to make a proposal to make it official.

If you have any problems, the first person to go to is your DM. Explain the issue and try to work something out. If an agreed upon solution cannot be found there, you can speak to the judge overseeing the adventure. Judge decisions are final.